They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

He screamed and screamed and screamed and you fumbled, fumbled, fumbled. I remember silently pleading with you to give him the answer he wanted to hear. I was angry that you couldn’t just say the right words to make him stop. It didn’t occur to me to be angry at him.

But I can still remember the way I froze in the back seat. I can still feel the fear of not knowing if I’d see you again. I can finally locate the anger that rushed through me that day and, with no outlet, fell somewhere deep within me when I realized that Papa wasn’t taking us home. He was returning to the school. We had to go to the fair and perform as the exceptional family everyone expected us to be.

There was a time when my outspokenness brought us together instead of tearing us apart. There was a time when speaking my mind was received not as a threat but as an act of love.

The difference in treatment between son and daughter would ripple through generations, one learning entitlement, the other learning injustice. One sibling would lean into nostalgia for lost culture to justify his behavior, while the other would struggle to reclaim her lost culture, observing how tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change.

My memories highlight the anger and likely downplay the periods of kindness that followed, probably because none of us addressed the tumult, and therefore the bad moments left a stronger imprint on my mind than the good ones did. I was always on guard for the next rupture of peace, this thing I knew was coming but could never predict or prevent.

He had no awareness that I was imitating the very behavior that he modeled at home. But my treatment of you wasn’t simply mimicry, either. It was a clumsy expression of anger over how mother was raising daughter to learn that to be good is to betray oneself, to forever contort oneself to fit into impossible, contradictory expectations of womanhood that felt stifling.

I felt a dissonance that I could not yet articulate, a tear in what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “double-consciousness” of race, not knowing how to meld my distinct identities. I understood these two versions of myself as Indian—my home self—and American—my outside self. I was anxious that either I would not be Indian enough for Papa or I would not be American enough for Nancy and Marin. Ultimately, I’d be outed as a fraud by everyone I cared about.

I struggled to determine whether the behaviors in Papa that I found distasteful stemmed from differences rooted in culture. While cultural norms certainly played a role in what Nancy and Marin found different about our family’s dynamics, I think that what they pointed out to me as concerning was not simply code-switching or differences of collectivist cultural norms. At college I existed to others not as a daughter or as a sister but as an individual, and they had each been alarmed by the degree to which the woman they knew was diminished around Papa.

Even as I felt pathetic and childlike, defending myself in a rundown apartment that my father paid for, through a phone he had bought for me, I knew that something larger was at stake. Had I retreated, I would have validated Papa’s belief that bullying me was an appropriate way to get what he wanted. If I buckled now, I would be inviting into adulthood the very treatment that I had tried so hard to escape as a girl. I would be setting a precedent that I was still his to control.

But Buaji never made me feel like what I said was wrong; she didn’t inhale it like gossip, and she didn’t sensationalize it by getting livid on my behalf. She listened. And I didn’t know that I needed that so badly, but I did. I needed someone to hear me, really hear me, and tell me that what I felt was okay to feel, because I didn’t trust my own senses. And I needed to know that, despite all the material comforts I enjoyed and all the gifts that Papa bestowed upon me, what I experienced was difficult, and I wasn’t bad or weak for thinking so.

But it seemed like he wanted me to accept that I would be his verbal punching bag and not take it personally or ever allow it to create distance between us.

It didn’t feel fair to take it quietly and then also show him grace when I had been given none, all for the sake of family, which increasingly felt like a farce.

Deep down, I had always feared that I was just like Papa, because, like him, I was hot-tempered, stubborn, and highly critical. I insisted that the world exist the way I wanted it to, and when it failed to meet my expectations, I got righteously angry. It was only in not lashing out that I was able to prove to myself that I wasn’t the same.

But that summer, I began to see how owning my reactions and behavior liberated me. By not responding to Papa’s tantrums, I took myself out of them entirely, to the point where I could recognize the absurdity of his actions. I started to understand the directionality of the movement, how it traveled from one source and then stopped at another. His outbursts were a pattern—not an anomaly. I didn’t understand what caused his anger, but I was no longer willing to submit to the repetitive cycle.

Yush wanted his loving family back as much as I did. But to him, that meant I had to revert to my former role: to readily accept and always forgive mistreatment, and to never take it personally. Yush was right. This was what it would take to have our family back. The problem was, I didn’t want to sacrifice myself like that anymore.

It was a performance I knew well, though in the past my acting had been automatic. This time, it felt forced. Now I chafed underneath the mask I wore.

But I knew that what I wanted was not likely to materialize. In fact, I was now certain nothing would change. I saw the cycle resetting, preparing to begin anew. I promised myself that this time, I would not participate.

It was this cycle that hurt so much, the sense that he could express care only when he could play the hero.

But when I was just being myself—even when I was not trying to prove some point—I was still wrong somehow. Too loud or too outspoken or too opinionated or too independent—traits that Papa had encouraged when I was a girl but found threatening as I became a woman. It was only because I did not fit into his world that I began to ask why I did not and why I could not.

But to me, it was offensive to view Papa’s troubling behavior through cultural tropes like “strict Indian dad” or “tiger parent.” Such dismissals normalized mistreatment and implied that our dysfunction was an inevitability resulting from our cultural or ethnic identities. The refusal to seek explanations beyond these tropes had severe consequences.

It’s a strange thing to miss someone who is right there. When I talk to you is when I miss you the most, because I am confronted by what I cannot have.